What a lovely concept – your computer / phone and so on can now start thinking for themselves. And it’s going to make your life easier and give you more leisure-time and so on. If you think how paperless most offices became after computers became ubiquitous – well.
Like everything, this is just the beginning – there will be some false starts and there will be some real progress. And people will shout for it and against it. (And the people shouting against it will be louder and more vocal.) But this is a new wave and we must ride it. People who fail to ride it will be left behind. A simple comparison – there was a prediction the the streets of London would be many feet deep in horse manure – and then came the internal combustion engine – solving that problem. But, many people were against it initially. Same with television, cell phones, computers and so on. And yet, here we are.
The thing that bothers me most is that companies will sneak in AI in your operating systems – on your notebook, on your phone. Imagine the frustration when you call a company, and you get to a computerised system where you need to choose an option, but what you need is not in one of the options. Now, imagine you need to do something on your notebook and you land in a similar situation.
Some complaints are that people are not going to think for themselves anymore, but I beg to differ. Steve Jobs said that the computer is the bicycle of the mind. With AI, it will become something vastly more superior – like the private jet of the mind.
Real AI – when computers start thinking and start improving themselves is another matter altogether. Very soon after that, we will have what Ray Kurzweil calls “the singularity”. The average IQ is 100 – someone really clever can have an IQ of 170. Imagine something that can improve itself and it’s IQ – imagine an IQ of 300, or 1 000, or 1 000 000. We are looking for life in other places in the universe, but, if aliens develop real AI and reach the singularity point, we cannot even speculate about what’s going to happen then. The only thing we can be certain about is, things will change dramatically – good or bad? Who knows. Chances are – we will see soon enough.
Update: I read recently that am AI running in Japan had to solve a problem – so this AI altered it’s own code and extended the time it had to solve the problem. AI coding itself – does it sound familiar? Think Terminator & Skynet. Let’s hope it does not come to that.
Another scary thought – AI can be used for all sorts of things – like helping to write a properly worded email, write a script to do things for you, assist with your coding and so on. But, there are bad people out there too. So they will use it for bad things like writing malware and ransomware, writing bots, attacking networks, infiltrating businesses and so on. I even saw the acronym RaaS – Ransomware as a service. How bad is that!>